21 June 2012

Fire

My neighbor's house burned the other night.


I live in a historic neighborhood. All of the homes here are at least 100 years old and all of them are wood-framed. Because this neighborhood was platted out in a time before such things as zoning, all of our houses sit very close to one another. The roof lines of two of my neighbors are separated by around three inches in fact.

We tend to be pretty paranoid when it comes to fire around here. All of us on this block have been particularly vigilant about fire safety because we know that if one house goes up, we'd lose the whole block.

Well, my neighbor's house burned the other night and mercifully, there was no wind blowing. The lack of wind and the fast response of the St. Pete Fire Department kept the fire contained. Had it been a windy night I'd be writing this from a Red Cross shelter.

Even so, the 20 minutes that the fire burned destroyed his home and left him with nothing but the clothes on his back.

He's a disagreeable guy. He's alienated all of us over the years but even so, my heart goes out to him.

I cannot imagine what it's like to lose everything in a fire. Despite his losses, he's fortunate to have made it out the back door before he lost his life to smoke inhalation. As it is, he and his dog made it to safety but his cat didn't.

Fire's not something that occurs to most people as a viable threat but it is. Do yourself a favor and guard yourself against it. Get at least two fire extinguishers. Keep one in your bedroom and one in your kitchen. Install and maintain smoke detectors. Put one outside of your bedroom and another one in your kitchen.

Think through an escape plan. If your house were on fire how would you make it out?

My neighbor was lucky, blessed even. He had no extinguishers or smoke alarms and that he survived that fire is something that borders on the miraculous.

Despite his suffering, this event has proved itself to be a cautionary tale to all of us on Seventh Avenue. It ought to be a cautionary tale to people everywhere. Fire extinguishers and smoke detectors will save your property and may very well save your life.

20 June 2012

Trading palm trees for corn fields

I grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And no, I'm not Amish.

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Lancaster's about an hour west of Philly but it's a world away. As you drive west from The City of Brotherly Love, the clock seems to work backwards. The urban congestion gives way to the gently rolling farmland of Chester and Lancaster Counties. This is the place where the American Revolution played out and Lancaster is the oldest inland city in the US. My ancestors settled there in 1740 and those rolling hills are encoded in my DNA.

When I was younger and living there I felt the place to be a prison. Getting to Philly or Baltimore was a pain and I always felt like I was missing out on something because I lived in a small town. I longed for a change of venue, some kind of different scenery.

What I couldn't see back then was how beautiful an area it is and how fortunate I was to live just a bit removed from the harried nature of life in a major metro. I left the area for good in the early '90s and sought my fortune elsewhere.

A funny thing has happened here in the last couple of years though. The housing collapse reaped a pretty grim harvest in Florida and one by one, most of my friends left the area in search of greener pastures. As they left, I started traveling for work a lot. While this was going on I've found myself looking for an anchor time and again. I needed something to tie me to Florida, to home.

That anchor never materialized however. In fact, as people continue to move away I'm less tied to this place than I ever have been. Part of me knows that I could go out and make new friends, but another part of me doesn't want to put forth the effort.

While all of this has been playing out, I've begun to see the appeal of the land where I was born and raised. I've been back for short visits in the last few years and my beloved brother Steve's been offering me his guest room for a longer stay.

So I'm going to do it. I'm going back to Pennsylvania for the entire month of July. I'll stay with Steve, work from his home and get a first hand look at what life's like in Lancaster now. I can take the train to New York from there without any trouble and I'll have ready access to just about anywhere in the northeast, thanks to Amtrack.

Because it's farm country, the local produce I'll have access to is already making my mouth water. I'm looking forward to baking bread with my nieces and catching up with my nephews and siblings. I have an enormous family and our get togethers are as loud as they are legendary. It'll be great to cook for an army without the stress of having to leave right away.

Truth be told, I'm staying for a month as a test of sorts. I want to see if I can handle living there again. I want to see if I can handle trading palm trees for corn fields. I'm going into this with my eyes wide open and had someone told me five years ago that I would consider moving back to PA someday I'd have laughed hysterically.

July will be an interesting month, that's for sure. As I mentioned in a Let's Blog Off post last fall, my life in Florida has always felt like borrowed time, even after 20+ years. I'm a Yankee's Yankee as hard as I try to ignore that.


As much as I love walking down the sidewalk to the beach, it doesn't really feel real. People in the Northeast think faster, understand things better and forge deeper bonds than they do here. Pennsylvania has a sense of place I miss. Leaving when I did was difficult, I felt that I was severing ties that were supposed to last a lifetime. I hope to reconnect some of those ties next month.

So I'll be blogging like a madman while I'm up there. I'll be experiencing things and places I know already but it'll feel like it's the first time. I love living where I do, but something's missing. Maybe I'll find the missing piece next month. And maybe I won't but it never hurts to look.

19 June 2012

My carpet arrived!

Here it is in situ.


I wrote about this originally a couple of weeks ago. I'm thrilled with my Novica experience and if you're in the market for handmade goods from around the world, check out their site.

I was worried about ordering something as complicated as a carpet over the internet but this thing has exceeded every expectation I had. The colors are more subtle than I was anticipating and it works like a charm in my living room.

I came into this carpet with the help of a $200 credit from Novica, a website that allows craftspeople from the developing world to sell their wares to westerners directly. As you go through the ordering process from Novica, you get a glimpse into the life of the person who made whatever you order.

In my case, my carpet was made by a man in India named Kahlil Ahmed. Kahlil sent me a note along with his carpet and the money he made from the carpet I bought will go to feed his family and help him to keep working as a carpet weaver. Not only did I get an item to make my living room look better, I got a story and the opportunity to make someone's life better.

I ordered my carpet on 6 June and it shipped from India the following day. It arrived here on Saturday the 16th and the shipping charges were negligible when I think about how far this carpet came.

Novica provides a forum for direct interaction between westerners and the developing world and that's really cool. The carpet in my living room just made the world a smaller place. Thank you Kahlil for making my home a more welcoming place and thank you Novica for the opportunity to make the connection with Kahlil. I have a handmade living room carpet!

Novica is promoting a couple of products lines in particular now. Check out these links.


Women's shawls from Peru
Men's silver cufflinks from Indonesia
Leather belts
Women's accessories from Mexico
Men's clothing from Peru
Silver floral bracelets

17 June 2012

Check out this great method to peel garlic

I love garlic and I cook with it all the time. I swear I go through two full bulbs a week and I live alone.

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I usually peel it by flattening a clove with the flat side of my chef's knife and peel from there. However, if I need a lot of it I have another method to peel it that I got from Saveur.com. People don't believe me when I describe this way to deal with fresh garlic and this morning, my good friend Nancie Mills-Pipgras (editor of Mosaic Art Now) posted the video that got me started on this whole thing on her Facebook page.

It reminded me that this is something that needs to be spread around. Check it out.




How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds from SAVEUR.com on Vimeo.


How cool is that? I can tell you from first hand experience that it works every bit as well as it does in the video above.

It's Father's Day today, a day set aside specifically to be grateful for fathers. I'm endlessly grateful for mine and I'll be telling him that in a few hours when I call him. If you're close enough geographically to see a father today, make him something garlicky for supper. If you don't cook don't sweat it, just let him know you're glad he's in your life.

15 June 2012

¡Adios mosquitos!

See this?


It may be the thing that saves my summer.

That's an InaTrap, a mosquito trap that's actually attractive.

Most mosquito traps and bug zappers are an eyesore, but the InaTrap turns all of that on its head.

I have a big table on my patio and as often as not, I use it as a dining table. When I have people over, that's where we eat. Not only that, my next door neighbors and I tend to sit out there and talk long into the night. This set up works out perfectly for most of the year. However, when the rainy season kicks in every May, the mosquitoes come with it. The rains continue through the end of September and during the wet months, lingering at my patio table becomes an exercise in mosquito evasion.

I've thought about mosquito traps before but they're always such an eyesore. Not so the InaTrap.


The InaTrap is the result of the collaboration of Acase, a manufacturer of acessories and cases for iPhones, iPads and the rest, and the design house Inadays. The InaTrap won the 2012 Taiwan design excellence award and I can see why.

Its compact design uses just five watts of power and how it works is pretty ingenious. Here's a diagram:


The device uses a combination of UV light and a photocatalytic reaction that produces low levels of CO2. The CO2 convinces the little monsters that there's a tasty human being at the source of that gas. Once the mosquito enters the trap, it gets caught up in a nearly silent downdraft and it lands in a chamber that's out of sight. Oh, and they don't survive the trip across the fan blades. Boo hoo.

Here's the whole collection:


The InaTrap measures 215 x 215 x 315 mm (or 8.46 x 8.46 x 12.4 inches) and weighs 1.2 kg (2.64 lbs.), its lamp has an 18,000 hour lifespan and it carries a one year warranty.

The InaTrap is available in North America now on Amazon. I know I don't live in the only part of the world where mosquitoes descend en masse every summer evening.

So what do you guys think? What's the best way do deal with mosquitoes?